A journey down the rabbit hole of Rubik's-style puzzles

walk-through

So, yeah, another “hardware” post. I haven’t stopped learning algs or anything like that. Mucho in the works…just not ready to commit to film yet.

I recently bought from The Cubicle a HeShu Super Big 3×3 cube — or just Giant Cube for short. How giant is giant? Well, not that giant. Let’s go with relatively giant. At 18cm wide, the Giant Cube is a bit more than three times the size of a standard 57mm cube (three times 57mm = 17.1cm). As shown in the video below, a cubie from said Giant is just a bit bigger than a whole 57mm cube:

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Congratulations to Cubing Cubes for winning my Aolong give-away contest. His video was one of 19 walk-through entries and 1750+ subscriber entries. Here’s a video explnation of the winner determination and my walkthrough of the scramble I had provided:

The Scramble

D2 U' R2 U F2 D2 U' R2 U' B' L2 R' B' D2 U B2 L' D'

I thought my own walk-through (my first on video, perhaps?) was pretty decent, although it shows (around 5:30) that I could have paired red/green more easily; I forgot that the back/right slot was empty. And, yeah, there’s that pesky editing error in the audio at 7:10. Oh well. Continue reading →

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It’s been a while since my last give-away of my custom LED-backlit cube. That was in celebration of hitting 1500 subscribers. Well, it’s been six months, and, although my subscriber count did subsequently increase, it’s plateaued recently. Time to attract new subscribers, while giving current subscribers an opportunity to win as well. Here are the details, which are also summarized in this video (embedded below).

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Once upon a time, this blog was something other than just a collection of my embedded Youtube videos. In fact, it was more like a repository of neat things related to cubing. Besides acting as an online chronicle of sorts, which is a function I still really dig, I want to steer the blog back to including other content.

This recent Cubing World video is a great excuse to do that. A follow up to last year’s Twelve Cubers, One Scramble video, this one features thirteen fast 3×3 solvers (two the current world record holders) each doing CFOP walk-through solves based on the same scramble:L2 B' L2 B' D2 B' R2 D2 F2 R2 B' L B' U' R' D' B2 L2 U' B U2

This video is great. As I commented on it, the solves demonstrate really well that solving a cube is not just a robotic application of memorized steps — naysayers’ favorite criticism. No doubt there is a formulaic element of “see X and apply Y,” especially at the OLL and PLL stages. But the amount of variation in these walk-throughs showcases the high degree of analysis, problem solving, and creativity that go into a really good solve.﻿ And these are no lackeys. That some of the best cubers in the world each approached the same scramble differently is a testament to the deep complexity of the cube.

Over the past week, I’ve spent a little more time than usual on youtube. There’s a lot of good stuff out there, but even more junk. Of all the videos/channels I’ve visited, I’ve been most impressed with CrazyBadCuber‘s. In particular, I found this 3×3 walk-through video to be enormously helpful (especially for F2L look-ahead/tracking):

As someone averaging around 45 seconds with a personal best of 34, this narrated play-by-play helped me identify all sorts of inefficiencies in my current technique — and encouraged me to slow down and practice better techniques.

P.S. Notice the new domain? No more “.wordpress.” in there. For a mere $18/year, I figured it was time to (pretend to) do this for real….